1. John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 80–81. In the same paragraph, Brannigan refers to new historicism’s success in “replacing the right-wing formalist orthodoxy with a historicizing and politicizing agenda. …”
2. The most nuanced and persuasive version of this argument of which I am aware is Alan Liu’s “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” ELH 56 (1989): 721–771; for a variety of others, see Strier, Resistant Structures, 70–78; Ryan, New Historicism, xiii–xiv;
3. Howard Felperin, “‘Cultural Poetics’ versus ‘Cultural Materialism’: The Two New Historicisms in Renaissance Studies,” in The Uses of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 154–55;
4. Don E. Wayne, “Power, Politics, and the Shakespearean Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States,” in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 61; and Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Howard and O’Connor, Shakespeare Reproduced, 35–37. On the formalist connotations of the term “cultural poetics,” see Brannigan, New Historicism, 83–84, 91–92; and Ryan, New Historicism, xiv. Greenblatt has refuted some of these charges against his own practice in “Resonance and Wonder” (Learning to Curse, 161–183). In “After the New Historicism” (Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2, ed. Terence Hawkes [London: Routledge, 1996], 17–37), Steven Mullaney offers a qualified defense of Greenblatt while distinguishing his work from that of other new historicists more interested in resistance and historical change. While for the moment I am less interested in the accuracy than in the irony of these charges of “cultural formalism,” I will return to them later to assess their relationship to new historicism’s (non) treatment of literary form.
5. For a useful summary of their work in relation to Marxist theories of literary form, see Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 27–34.